There were two projects:

Drive up attendance to museums
Enrich a visitor's experience through means of validation, and direct input.

The first project was general and there was no specific technology or design we decided on.

The second project was our primary focus. We recognized the importance of visitors wanting to have input or impact on the exhibit as a way of "putting a stamp" on their experience (the input part of the process). Then to be able to return to the same exhibit a later time to see the effect / result of their input (the validation part of the process).

One idea was to allow users to tag displays based on a question like "How does this make you feel?" (input). This would allow other museum visitors to create customized tours of the museum based on keywords like "romantic". Thus the taggers are creating an effect on the museum (validation).

Tags could be ranked, thus unpopular tags are hidden / naturally filtered from view.

Another idea would be to have fold-out display next to works that helps give the viewer additional information by highlighting certain areas of the artifact. This fold-out display can also be linked to Flickr or similar social web service where web users can markup the artifact with their interpretations. Museum visitors will be able to see these comments in addition to the museum's curator's response.

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